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Humans Evolving 100 Times Faster Than Ever
John Hawks writes "A new genomics study in PNAS shows that humans have been evolving new adaptive genes during the past 10,000 years much faster than ever before. The study says that evolution has sped up because of population growth, making people adapt faster to new diseases, new diets, and social changes like cities. Oh, and I'm the lead author. I've been reading Slashdot for a long time, and let me just say that our study doesn't necessarily apply to trolls."
Is that implying evolution? 10,000 years!! I thought Earth is only 7,000 years old. I declare this article a heresy.
http://ebgp.net/ccc/
Rapid evolution in the past 10000 years - maybe. In the past 50 years - no way. Nowdays everybody can have an offspring no matter what diseases, diets or social changes he is subjected to.
From the article:
The researchers looked for the appearance of favorable gene mutations over the past 80,000 years of human history by analyzing voluminous DNA information on 270 people from different populations worldwide. (Emphasis mine)
This is what I can't stand about science by press release (and yes, I'm a scientist). Pretty sweeping conclusion drawn from a miniscule sample size.
I've been reading Slashdot for a long time, and let me just say that our study doesn't necessarily apply to trolls.
The irony of this statement is overwhelming.
Not only is human evolution speeding up, but so is self-promotion, apparently.
Maybe it's all that pollution...
;).
And maybe Chernobyl helped
OMFG! dat so kewl evolution is da r0xx0r! we r the 1337!!!11 LOLZ
Well, thanks to the Internet, I'm now bored with sex.
A question for Professor Hawks:
An interesting result to be sure, and not far-fetched at all, considering things like Belyaev's silver fox research from the mid-20th century, where artificial selection was shown to greatly accelerate the evolutionary process in terms of behavior.
My question, though, concerns the time scale of accelerated human evolution over the past 10,000 years versus the apparently much faster rate of "evolution" of technology. Some have argued that technological advancements stunt evolutionary change by reducing the severity of natural selection pressures such as the ability to provide food for oneself or to make contact with a mate. (For example, my vision, while corrected to normal levels through the technology of lenses, would have made my chances of reproduction several hundred years ago even lower than they are now.)
Since technology progression has increased to such a fast rate in the past 100 to 200 years, has the rate of technological improvement outstripped the capability of evolutionary processes to keep up? Will we see a decrease in the rate of evolution during very recent history (and, er, future history) due to this increasing difference in time scales, i.e., was the accelerated evolution rate during the past 10,000 years due in part to technological advancement reaching a sort of "sweet spot" that has since been (or will be) surpassed?
Not that any of this will matter once our new robotic overlords take over the planet, but it's still academically interesting.
Are we really evolving faster, or are we, as a population experiencing a higher rate of mutations? Not all mutations are good, but with our advanced medicine, poor mutations are now survivable.
I thought evolution, didn't occur until selective environmental pressure, weeded out the non-favorable traits. I really don't *think* that happening at a higher rate. I suspect we just have a giant gene pool with a lot of variability.
So which is it John? Are we mutating faster or evolving faster?
P.S. Fascinating work. Kudos.
You come down under my bridge and say that!
Blank until
I know, it only seems like yesterday that I was an AC.
There are no loopholes. It's either legal or it's not.
Evolution is most likely encouraged by viruses. The reason is that they will grab a snippet from one person (and other entity), and insert it into our genomes. Almost certainly we have only found a fraction of these viruses, and will find more once we start looking in the right places. The interesting thing is that as we get denser in terms of population, I believe it will increase even faster. Likewise, we will see interesting issues such as general increase in miscarriages (incompatable genes being spread around).
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
You have the concept of "backwards"... um... backwards. Backward evolution means that you become less adapted to your surroundings, and are less likely to survive. It doesn't aim for some lofty ideal of perfection, where anorexia will kill you, and all our survival mechanisms are aesthetically pleasing.
You know, there is a difference between trolling and pointing out the flaws in your reasoning. Just saying.
A rate of change of distance is velocity. A rate of change of velocity is acceleration.
Evolution is how many changes are occuring over a period of time. You can measure a rate of evolution, i.e. whether the number of changes over time is increasing or decreasing.
Donte Alistair Anderson Roberts - hi son!
Karma: Chameleon
Reduce, reuse, cycle
as soon as we get a pandemic disease, all the weak thin people will die, and the fat and strong will rule the earth. MWAHAHAHAHAAAA!! I do not share your confidence in the natural selection merits of pandemics. According to this blog, during the 1918 pandemic, the death rate for people aged between 25 and 34 was as high as that for people between 1 and 4 and between 70 and 80 (graph).
(...) the beauty canon. I, for one, welcome our new artillery wielding supermodel overlords. Oh wait.
Firehed - Unfortunately, thanks to medical breakthroughs, common sense is not as common as it once was.
Organisms don't evolve - they are rather fixed by the DNA they have. Species evolve over time, not individuals.
I am friends with one of the researchers involved, and yes they are quite aware of the non-PC consequences of this paper (just look up the USATODAY article for a good quote). Come on, Cochran is the same guy who wrote the Ashkenzai paper that hit Slashdot a couple years back, about selection for intelligence in Ashkenazi Jews.
Successful copulation advances evolution. The more sex the better chances to have offspring, which seek adaptation. We should all have sex with every suitable body. The more diverse the better. Now. Forget about the thought systems and public codes, this is for the human race! Let's hyperseed!! Woohoo!!! oh yeah.
What be happening mon?
You concept of evolution is slow compared to our daily respec.
It's not true! It's just that God has been intelligently re-designing us at a higher rate.
The fittest specimens will still get the best mates, and the losers will get to bonk only other losers. Someone with one or two serious defects might get to shag someone else with only one or two serious defects, but their offspring, with a cluster-fuck of defects, will be increasingly less likely to reproduce. We can still ensure they have a good quality of life, however, their patent genetic crappiness will make "being allowed to reproduce" moot. Fuck authoritarianism, we don't need it.
Software patents delenda est.
We're not evolving faster, the increased population size just means we can explore a larger portion of the evolutionary search space at one time than we were able to previously. There is still the minimal time between reproduction(s) which currently stands at about ~14 years (not taking into account morality) which is needed to introduce change(s) into the population. And Evolution is based on negative feedback, we don't evolve towards something - everything that isn't suitable dies.
Shh.
that selection pressure has decreased. People have *fewer* children since the invention of industry and medicine, not more. Virtually all industrialized nations including the US reproduce at or below replacement rate. Immigration is largely what keeps populations from dipping, and countries that lack significant immigration do see decreases in population.
It is true that people are dying young less, but that doesn't mean that selection pressure has decreased, it has just changed.
Think about what sort of basis people are allowed to reproduce on now, and ask yourself what the likely outcomes are. There are a number of factors. People who are too uneducated or dumb to practice birth control are reproducing at a significantly higher rate than the educated population. People who are more physically attractive are more likely to find mates in general. Now that second point isn't really a problem as attractiveness is connected to health. However, let's look at the things that are no longer selected for.
While in the past people with wealth and power tended to be selected for, and poor families tended to slowly die off, especially in feudal societies, this is no longer true as the wealthy tend to be educated and thus practice birth control. This might be good from a social justice picture, but it also means that intelligence has virtually no way of being selected for any more. After all, if intelligence didn't select for itself by helping to acquire wealth in human society, how did it select for itself?
The main question is now, is intelligence in any way still being selected for? If it isn't, then it seems likely that there will be a backwards slide in human intelligence until the situation changes.
It's not "faster", it's "more quickly", as it's a comparative adverb...
They will never know the simple pleasure of a monkey knife fight
Careful, now you've revealed the Secrets of Scientology. Raving cultists will come after you. :P
(Unless you're a raving cultist yourself. Er... I have somewhere else to be, quickly.)
In terms of number of selected variants, the three populations in the HapMap are quite similar -- each has around 3000 new selected variants by our measures. Few of these are shared, because these recent things haven't had time to spread. Of the things that aren't shared, some of them probably have parallel phenotypic effects.
For example, skin pigmentation genes causing lighter skin in Europeans are largely different from those in East Asians, even though they have the same general effect. Still, some specific effects, like hair pigmentation, may be quite different.
Other genes respond to selection pressures that have historically been very different. Malaria is a huge source of selection in African populations historically, but it was much less important in Europeans, for example.
As far as behavioral variations, the fact is that we don't know what most genetic changes may do. So we certainly can't say that some populations have undergone more or less behavioral change than others. Most of these changes are genetically very simple, so we're not looking at any kind of radically new changes in phenotype -- no growing antlers. The same would be true of any kind of behavioral changes under selection.
(note: the above is neither for or against evolution or intelligent design)
Every time this kind of discussion comes up, people tend to favor, mention, or joke about in frighteningly large numbers what is practically eugenics.
Also, in the last 10,000 years, people have generally not reproduced outside of their own race, due to long distance constraints. As such, some racist groups will obviously use this report to show that their group is "superior" in some fashion, with this "science" to prove it.
It's not that we should curtail research because of those problems, but it's something to think about a little more when we start having ideas that coincide with them.
"Not all mutations are good, but with our advanced medicine, poor mutations are now survivable."
Don't get me wrong - I'm a big fan of humans. But human arrogance is what makes you think you can identify the difference between a 'poor' mutation and a 'good' one. Way back in the day, as the story goes, some proto-humans started walking upright, causing all sorts of back problems that persist until today. Good or bad?
Or that whole forebrain thing; and certainly the individual relative lack of strength and speed. Hairlessness; it certainly makes winters cold! But the thing is that every mutation has a cost and a benefit, and only the long term will tell whether that mutation is viable - which is a far cry yet from an objective determination of 'good' or 'bad'.
When you have a set of mutations that is viable, regardless of their qualitative comparisons to the status-quo niche of the parent species, that is called speciation. There is a natural division of species over time, as adaptive success leads to less selection pressure, which in turn leads to a wider range of mutations that can, over the short term survive in order to determine long term viability as the niche market shifts.
And the upshot is that there is no good or bad; just different. You can bet that humans will eventually evolve into different species, perhaps sooner than expected. We aren't going 'forward', we're going in all directions - behaving on a genetic level like a gases tend to behave in regards to their physical environment; by spreading out to fill it.
[Ego]out
Defective howso though? If they have a survival cost, they will be selected against, if they do not have a survival cost then they are adapted to their environment.
If the environment changes, they may be less well adapted but that could equally apply to many things we would not regard as "defective" currently.
Rich
According to this blog, during the 1918 pandemic, the death rate for people aged between 25 and 34 was as high as that for people between 1 and 4 and between 70 and 80
I believe the reason that pandemic killed the 25-34 age group deals with something called a Cytokine Storm. H1N1 (the 1918 flu virus) infects the lungs, and the body freaks out and starts attacking the lungs with abandon to get rid of the virus. Thus, those in the 25-34 range (with a strong immune system) were more likely than normal to die because that strong immune system turned against them.
:(){
Ok, so maybe we are mutating faster, or there are more of us around so there are more mutations, etc. But as I understand: evolution = random mutation + non-random selection. Right now it seems there is no selection at all. Even the impotent and infertile can reproduce now. Unless one gets killed before they become a teen they'll most likely reproduce.
Have new alleles actually come into existence, or were existing ones selected?
I think it does indeed apply to trolls and prist fosters: evolution does not necessarily mean progress—it can simply indicate a species adapting to fill a niche.
Ben Hocking
Need a professional organizer?
Is this what old earth creationism says? Or is this just scientific ignorance? You can't accept a theory based partly on a wealth of modern-day evidence and then say it doesn't exist anymore.
Evolution is not how life came into being. It's how life came to be what it is, and how it will come to be what it will be in the future.
Life would be easier if I had the source code.
Thank you for the elementary lesson in evolution. I stated that the end point is reproduction, but death is indeed relevant as it places limits (sometimes prohibitive) on the opportunities for reproduction.
You also leave unanswered the dual contradiction in belief systems I raised. What is the motivation of atheists/evolutionists who seem to overwhelmingly support the drain on their resources caused by public charity? Is it aesthetic? Because it seems disproportionately costly versus the potential gain to an individual to be had by the otherwise lacking presence of a small percentage of other individuals. If, on the other hand, it is because they are afraid of their own inadequacy to compete and thrive in a free market, then it seems to be a negative sum game, i.e. a downward spiral for society.
Then there's the dual of this problem, which is Christians who are uncharitable. I have my own overly judgmental opinions as to the largest part of this problem, centering around and permutating from church as a social exercise.
But the points underlying those I made before is that the "cushy" environment is artificial, and in a mechanistic evolution such as you espouse would thus yield mutations that are unsustainable absent that cushy environment. If we evolved intelligence as a survival trait, we are certainly not putting it into service to see that our effects on our evolutionary process yield long term positive results, which ought to be part of the point of good adaptations (which we are led to believe our intellect is).
Also, many who have mutations that would never have allowed them to survive childhood to reproduce are today doing so, which means that the power of evolution to produce the utility in the environment at large is diminished. Again, this is purely mechanistic.
Personally, I look at evolutionary and genetic determinists in the same way as I do religions that endorse some form pre-destination, fate, or inevitability: with a great deal of skepticism.
"If still these truths be held to be
Self evident."
-Edna St. Vincent Millay
There is an interesting book by Richard Lynn called "dysgenics". He shows that in modern societies, we are actually selecting backwards in that the least smart people are having more children on average. I think it comes to about one IQ point per generation that we are losing.
I think I read about the book, but if we're losing one IQ point per generation, then the world will be on average, retarded in 20-30 generations?
"When you do things right, no one will know you've done anything at all." ~God, Futurama.
What you said sounds vaguely similar to a recent Slashdot post about retroviruses. Unfortunately, all you've demonstrated is poor reading comprehension. You have no idea what you're talking about, and throwing around jargon doesn't make you make sense.
Of course, it sounds brilliant to the Slashbot crowd.